Pink

The Pink Buildings were always there. No one ever saw how they came to be. No one saw the painters or the brushes and not even the ladders. No one bothered to change them or be changed by them for they were neither envious nor inspired by such lively color. The nomads crawled inside, the crowds saturated the place, but no one filled the Pink Buildings. The Pink Buildings were full.

On the third floor of the third Pink Building, three men shared a bedroom, a bathroom, and three windows. They rarely spoke, they rarely felt, they merely touched. A certain humidity pervaded their place. Although devoid of emotion, their place somehow garnered its atmosphere from darker shades of other men; aspiring. The dense droplets, suspended above their heads, almost fell in touch with them but never dripped down their backs fearing the ghosts.

The Pink Buildings assembled themselves close to each other, surrounding a single garden with two naked trees and starving yet surviving grass. Dry and sparse, the grass wandered aimlessly sometimes. No one noticed it crawling up the walls of the Pink Buildings; no one cared.

The Writer didn’t care. Things like showering and shaving never found a place in his mind. They tried calling out to him, beseeching attention. His dark black hair seeped from his insides, penetrated his dreadful layers of skin, and escaped to the outside in a bristly scream. Deaf, he was, to dark sounds and yet his mind found a place within to fuse all these sounds and sputter them through his writing.

The Tailor didn’t care. His low heart rate hummed softly at night to evoke something more than his desperate measuring tapes and dragging dresses. His heart tried but in vain; all attempts futile in the face of a man whose hands knew nothing but numbers and needles.

While the Writer and the Tailor were asleep, the third man found a stranded piece of velvet lying on the window sill. Such blue violence seduced him and he was a man of fragile proclivities and lush taste; a velvety lynching. He didn’t wonder about anything; he knew what it felt like and it was the best feeling. The last.

The Tailor quit afterwards. The Writer left and never came back. The Pink Buildings pulsated with rotten flesh darker than its pink life and lost souls freer than its mystery.